Fiddle around with the Quebe Sisters

It’s striking to witness a Quebe Sisters performance for the first time. That’s because there is nothing else like it – a trio of siblings playing triple fiddles in the style of western swing and singing close harmonies.

A local audience experienced the sister magic last month, when Hulda, Sophia and Grace Quebe performed as part of the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra’s annual Fourth of July show at Riverbend.

The Quebes are Texans who come out of the tradition of the late Bob Wills, the fiddler, bandleader and most famous practitioner of a hybrid of jazz and honky-tonk known as western swing. Wills tunes like “San Antonio Rose,” “Faded Love” and “Steel Guitar Rag” are country classics.

Wills and western swing provide a foundation for the Quebes, but as Sophia Quebe points out, she and her sisters have their own thing going, rocking the house despite touring with only a two-piece backing band of guitar and bass.

“No one knows how to categorize it, per se, because they’ve never really seen anything like what we do before,” she says. “I’ve only seen triple fiddles played maybe twice in my life in a band setting. It’s something that originated out of western swing, Bob Wills’ music. It is kind of unusual, the format that we have, three fiddles, guitar and bass. I guess especially in this day and age it’s just something that’s unique.”

The Quebe Sisters put another personalized spin on western swing by searching for rare material. The title track of their most recent album, “Every Which-a-Way,” is a relatively unknown song by the late Moon Mullican, a Texas honky-tonk piano player who recorded many of his crucial singles for King Records in Cincinnati.

But what thrills Sophia even more than finding the perfect forgotten song to cover is writing one of her own. She embraces the evolution of the Quebes from performers to composer-performers, noting that it’s not always easy to come up with the goods when measuring her work against classics by the likes of Wills and Mullican.

“Before I wrote my first song, that concept intimidated me,” she says. “Sometimes your heroes can intimidate you into thinking, ‘Well, I can never write a song as good as that.’ But if that little voice is talking to you in the back of your head, it can be limiting. You just have to kind of let it go and try things. And sometimes you’ll be surprised. It’s just kind of this mysterious process. I don’t claim to feel like an expert in it yet. So many great things have been done, and you don’t want to do something that doesn’t hold up to the past. It’s a challenge.”

The Quebes can play western swing as well as anyone. Sophia Quebe is taking the next step.

“I feel like tradition is really innovation,” she says. “You learn from the people before you. You emulate. You learn all of the favorite songs and standards, and then it kind of seeps into your brain, and then you try to create a new conglomerate of all of those influences. That’s really the evolution of music.”